Identification of the Portuguese industrial districts

Some authors have tried to define a methodology of identification of the local production systems, namely in terms of the operationalization of the notion of industrial district. For the Portuguese case, there is no previous work, using of a systematic methodology of the identification, on the identification of the industrial districts, in spite of the existence of some case studies.In this paper we propose an algorithm of classification, based on the cluster analysis, and we try to find clusters of homogeneous geographical units, in order to identify the ones that we might classify as industrial districts. Our results point that almost one third of the Portuguese employment in manufacturing and 13% of all employment, is located in industrial districts. A detailed analysis of other variables, shows that the Portuguese industrial districts’ characteristics are very close to the ones found in other contexts.